Blurb

“My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.” Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams.”

The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist.

The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life’s path, and, above all, following our dreams.

Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. The Alchemist is such a book. With over a million and a half copies sold around the world, The Alchemist has already established itself as a modern classic, universally admired. Paulo Coelho’s charming fable, now available in English for the first time, will enchant and inspire an even wider audience of readers for generations to come.

Review

The Alchemist sits somewhere between Aesop’s fables and traditional greek mythology. And it snugs in between the two quite nicely. A light-hearted tale with a a purpose, this was a welcome palate cleanser after spending some time in the dark world of a Cormac McCarthy torture porn western before reading this one. If you read my review of that McCarthy work, you will see that i respected the writing, but didn’t enjoy the story. In The Alchemist, the writing is much less celebrated, but the story is much more enjoyable. To each their own. And to me, I’ll take this story of chasing dreams, maturing and coming to realizations that were there all along if we took the time to notice them.